“It is almost unthinkable that any one human could pick up where Bill Gates leaves off when he ends his full-time tenure Friday as Microsoft’s leader,” Jessica Mintz reports for The Associated Press.

MacDailyNews Take: Yes, it is unthinkable. Charlie Peace would have to rise from the dead.

Mintz continues, “But as Gates bones up on epidemiology at his charitable foundation, the software company he built with a mix of visionary manifestos and extreme hands-on management must still wake up Monday to face hard problems even he could not solve.”

Mintz continues, “From Microsoft’s start in 1975, Gates has been the company’s genius programmer, its technology guru, its primary decision maker and its ruthless and competitive leader. He would famously disappear into the solitude of a country cabin to digest employee-written papers and ponder the future of the industry, then emerge with manifestos…”

MacDailyNews Take: Like the Unabomber. And, Jessica, those weren’t employee-written papers, they were Mac OS discs.

Mintz continues, “At a May gathering of chief executive officers at Microsoft’s Redmond, Wash., headquarters, Gates outlined how he hoped to translate the work once done within the singular confines of his brain into the sort of group projects that could be managed with the company’s own collaboration software.”

MacDailyNews Take: Good God in Heaven.

Mintz continues, “‘We’ve created a thing we called quests, where we divided our types of customers down, and we got the best thinkers on these things, both the very practical people who are with the customers, the engineers who write the code, and the researchers who may be more unbound in terms of their timeframe and imagination, and put them together,’ Gates said.”

Mintz continues, “Gates did not give any examples of specific quests, though in 2006 and 2007 speeches he referred to the Tablet PC, an innovation he has championed for a decade but which has failed to catch on in the mainstream, as a quest.”

MacDailyNews Take: So, he’s really more like a mixture of Charlie Peace, Ted Kaczynski, and Don Quixote. It’s all finally making sense now.

Mintz continues, “If the quests are as deeply tied to Gates’ own ideas about the future as indicated by the few examples Ballmer mentioned, Microsoft may be in trouble. After all, even with Gates himself at the helm, Microsoft has yet to solve critical competitive headaches. The Internet has changed the means of distributing desktop software applications and even challenged the idea that they’re necessary. Microsoft has scrambled to catch up in music players, and remains an also-ran with its Zune. The most recent Windows Vista operating system landed with a thud. And Microsoft has stumbled badly in Web search and advertising, culminating in Ballmer’s quixotic, $47.5 billion pursuit of Yahoo Inc.”

MacDailyNews Take: Bingo! Well, happy retirement, Bill. Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.

MacDailyNews Take: If you’re looking for a tribute to Bill Gates, you’re at the wrong site. Luckily for you, there are plenty of mindless twits elsewhere who seem quite happy to gloss things over, rewrite history, and excuse and/or ignore criminal behavior. We only deal in facts here. Trying to buy your way into heaven with ill-gotten gains after plunging the world into a decades-long Dark Ages of Computing does not warrant a tribute.

Thanx for the overkill in the MDN takes…..as much as we all hate windows, let us remember that Gates did have some positive role in the early years of Apple as a partner. And if weren’t for windows domination in the 90’s, OS X might not have been as great as it is today…..and maybe vista wouldn’t be so disgusting…haha

The only thing these ‘focus’ groups seem to come up with is name changes for long in the tooth, unsuccessful, outmoded and bug ridden software hoping that they can be re=launched on a dull and unsuspecting public who simply won’t notice the sham. Hey after all the whole empire is based on doing that to IBM so what’s changed? Seems quite a lot for that repetitive trick is no longer working like it once did Billy boy. The one trick pony is put out to grass leaving the dung salesman wondering where his next load is coming from.